Having more NAND dies to multiiplex IO over only helps for some parts of the write process; and the more of them you have the less adding still more will help because other factors dominate more of the total time (Amdahl's law). As a result going to 500 from 250 gives less of a percentage boost than going to 250 from 120.

I suspect in the case of the 500, because all the mid/top end drives are clustering in a narrow performance band, that SATA III bottlenecking is coming into play in addition to limitations within the SSD itself.Reply

I thought there weren't more packages but rather larger packages? If I'm wrong then yeah it's probably SATA limitations but if not it's because it's the same bandwidth allocated per packages as previously.Reply

But they really aren't, OCZ is still OCZ and they are still making their own drives. I see that as a smart move by them because if Toshiba would have swallowed the company and they made some SSD's I know at least me and my tech friends would have stayed well and far away until EXTENSIVE reviews appeared.Reply

OCZ had a bad run of drives and couldn't get it fixed. Years before that, they made excellent memory, and good PSU's. Their early SSD's were pretty good too. Being hung up on their screw up sounds like you can't get over personal issues. They will come back and be profitable again. Toshiba will help right the ship. Reply

Yep. Let's not forget those poor early adopters of MacBook Air's that were unlucky enough to end up with a Toshiba drive instead of a Samsung (Apple was using both vendors through production, so it was luck of the draw)

Needless to say Apple doesn't use Toshiba SSD's much anymore, even with their bitterness with Samsung.Reply

You cannot blame a person for feeling that the OCZ name is a deterrent. Doesn't even have to be personal to want to see people avoid product that has not been good for years, hasn't been good through numerous models of drives, and has casued a great many people a lot of heart ache and frustration. All becasue OCZ couldn't bring themselves to make sure their product was viable and market ready BEFORE it went out their door.

Eventhough you make sense, that the company has a dark area which it lost the trust from a lot of people, it doesn't mean that it won't get better.

My first ever SSD was the Vertex 4 from OCZ, and guess what, it is still regarded as one of the best Performance SSD that money could buy today. 3 solid years of grinding the OS with constants write and read, it shows no drop in performance. I am not saying that failures are not real, but it doesn't go the extend that people make it out to be.

Now, i have just bought another Vector and Vector 150 for my rig, and i couldn't be more happier with a role of a normal consumer and an enthusiast of PC in general. Sometime, people just have to hate for the sake of hating without even trying to open their eyes to verify the current situation a little bit. Reply

That was my thought, as well. The purchase of OCZ made sense, because they have some decent controller IP and Toshiba wasn't too strong in that area, but the OCZ name is dirt because of their horrendous record of reliability, so I have no idea why they wanted to keep that.Reply

I remember an interview Anand posted years ago with the CEO of OCZ, and Anand was pretty adamant about them ditching their name (for obvious reasons) and the CEO said they were going to keep it. That didn't work out so great for them. I don't see it working for Toshiba, either. They need to ditch the name and come up with another one, or just call it Toshiba.Reply

Is there a manufacturer or drive we've missed? We don't favour any OEM over another and if there's a new product we'll review it.

However, a lot depends on the company's PR. OCZ has always been good at this as they approach us and provide samples under NDA prior to the launch, so the review process is smooth for us. Some companies are fairly poor at this as we always have to approach the OEM after the launch to get a sample at all.Reply

Since you asked, there are some SSD-related reviews I'd love to see from Anandtech:

1. The Sandisk X210. It promises Extreme II performance with many of the reliability features of an enterprise drive and excellent pricing.2. 'Hybrid' RAID 5 or RAID 6 configurations, with caching software such as LSI's Cachecade 2.0 or Adaptec's I-can't-remember-right-now. I've been specc'ing out such a system and found it startling how little in-depth, useful information there is out there about what sort of SSDs are appropriate (and why) and what configurations yield good price/performance outcomes.3. Along those lines, I'd really like to see how enterprise SSDs you've tested like the Intel DC S3500 perform in your client testing environment. It feels like your enterprise SSD testing is woefully truncated on the false assumption that no one would use enterprise SSDs in a client/workstation setting. Testing those drives more thoroughly would seem to be a much better use of your time than testing the Nth variation of whatever OCZ drive came out this week.

I hope you find this comment helpful, it's intended as constructive criticism. Still love the site!Reply

A recommendation regarding which LSI controller to choose: go for the 9271-8i. At this point, it's the natural choice for most new system builders because it offers better performance (and Fastpath enabled by default) as the 9266 or 9261 for roughly the same price.

Also, if LSI gives you any trouble about providing samples, just tell 'em that some random guy from the internet who calls himself grizzledyoungman wants to see that review. Should do the trick.Reply

1) I also would like to see more tests of SSDs in RAID arrays (RAID-5/6/10 - not just 0/1).2) I would love to see some enterprise controllers tested like the Adaptec ASR-72405 and ASR-8885.3) In addition to that, let's test more enterprise SSDs (like HGST's SSD800MM and the DC3700).4) For SMBs who want to build a fast server with awesome I/O, it would be good to see how these SSDs perform in a database server or as a virtual host server.Reply

Yeah, when products don't get reviewed, it's usually time to start bugging the company PR teams. The bigger and reputable sites have enough work already reviewing the stuff that gets sent to them by the brands that do have their acts together (and want things reviewed).Reply

I don't think it's good practice to rely upon free review samples. How do you know the company isn't cherry-picking? I believe it would be best to do what Consumer Reports does with all the items it tests: buy anonymously off-the-shelf.Reply

How is cherry picking NOT useful for better test results? That's what the definition of cherry picking is. Sounds like you either are ignorant of that fact or are defending OCZ for whatever reason.Reply

All OEMs do cherry-picking, so blaming OCZ is useless. However, in SSDs it doesn't matter that much because NAND is binned for endurance, not performance. While there can always be minor differences in performance between units, it's nowhere near as big as in e.g. CPUs.

As for buying review samples, that would not be financially efficient. Consumer Reports and the like are different because they're funded by the government or other huge organisation, whereas we are private. Furthermore, we wouldn't be able to deliver reviews on time for release because we'd have to wait for retail availability like everyone else. Reply

So you are telling me you would be okay with spending at minimum, tens of thousands of dollars on parts? Sure that is just ONE $300 SSD. What about about the other 15+ that they would need to get. Be realistic. If it is not a big deal, why don't you go buy that many. Sure they make money with this site, but it would take some time just to break even on the costs of the parts even for a large site like Anandtech. If you don't appreciate the effort they put in their reviews then stick to consumer reports.Reply

I own various branded SSDs, Intel, OCZ, Corsair to name a few.Some fails some don't (yes, even my intel X25-M G2 failed me at one point).

In the end, Anandtech readers are typically smart enough to run backups so any failures like that is not a big deal.I form my own price/performance/risk assesment:I use newegg, amazon, slickdeals, camelx3 for price.Anandtech, Toms and forums for performance.and lastly verified buyer comments at newegg & amazon for risk.

I could care less about a brand or what color is the box of my CPU/GPU.Reply

And some people are obsessed with hating OCZ. Sure they made several mistakes, some not directly related to their technology. But that happened years ago. Sit back and see how the new drives developed in coorporation with Toshiba work out. Judge those drives by what they are, not what their grand-grandfathers were.Reply

You make it sound like all of their problems with quality control and high failure rates happened in the ancient past. This site's Vector review sample died during testing less than 3 months ago. I'm on my 3rd Agility 4 after RMAs and this one needs to go back too. That drive only came out ~18 months ago. I'd be happy to embrace a new wave of OCZ SSDs that were reliable, but we won't know how well (or if) they've managed to turn things around until we get several models in consumers hands and have adequate time to judge reliability.Reply

Hrrm. Getting merged into Toshiba's SSD group is about the only thing that might have tempered my "never again" position on OCZ. By keeping them independent, they're doing nothing to convince me that they're going to change their ways. It's their own questionable decisions that got them into this mess (their reputation for poor reliability), sacrificing reliability at the alter of performance and shipping first.Reply

You think the Toshiba name is good reliability? I have 224 enterprise hard drives that would say differently. Four years ago, I got 204 Fujitsu/Toshiba (just after Toshiba took over) 146GB 15k SAS drives. Over the course of the first three years, I replaced 165 of them, plus 19 of the replacements that came in as Toshiba branded drives with the same model number. After the warranty ended, I have had to replace the remaining ones by purchasing new ones. None of them are left now. All have been replaced with Seagate Saavios of the same size. They are worse than any desktop level hard drives I have dealt with in my career. I've only had one incident like it, and that was replacing Dell Optiplex motherboards with embedded TNT2-m64 chips back in 2000.Reply

Seagate has rather questionable reliability themselves (see BackBlaze's recent study on this), but Toshiba's hard disk division is unrelated to their SSD division, so the reliability of one doesn't necessarily give any indication about the reliability of the other.Reply

In the 2.5" enterprise hard drive market, Seagate has been top of the heap for a long time. They really do well in that arena. There aren't a whole lot of players in that arena, though. Only Seagate, Toshiba (formerly Fujitsu,) and Hitachi. Seagate's Saavio line happens to be the first line ever in 2.5" 10k or 15k drives.

As far as desktop drives go, Seagate's desktop drives have had reliability problems for years, sure, but they aren't near as bad as Toshiba's desktop drives. Reply

Sorry, I don't take chances with storage. Samsung SSDs can't be beaten right now, and have proven rock solid over the last year. My family has 5 in total and most of my teammates at work have 500GB drives. Zero problems, great performance. Going with OCZ just seems needlessly risky.Reply

They have new corporate overlords, but it's still the same OCZ. That's really all I needed to know. I simply cannot trust the people at OCZ for any of the things I care about in a product: reliability, accountability, and service.Reply

The Newegg prices are different for the 2 lower capacity drives today. They are now $120 for the 120GB and $140 for the 240GB. Not a bad price for the 240GB drive. An extra $20 for double the storage is a no-brainer.Reply

"By doing additional validation, OCZ is able to pick the highest endurance parts and use them..."I don't understand this and it makes me curious: how can NAND be tested for endurance, and then used in an SSD? It seems to me that any extensive testing would use up a significant portion of the NAND's finite lifespan?And if testing the identical parts, how does a test differentiate good vs bad when it comes to endurance?TYReply

you couldn't pay me to use an OCZ product again. i've lost 4 vertex 2 ssd's due to random failures, and although they covered it under warranty each time(yes i bought one drive, died 4 times) its not worth the hassle or risk of data loss, especially when that risk of data loss isn't a question of IF it will fail, but only a question of WHEN it will fail.Reply

I'd love to see some SSD comparison/ranking charts. There's such a wide variety of makes/controllers out there these days that it's getting too hard to keep track of the best performance/dollar, reliability/dollar or best drive/specific use.

When I first generated the graphs, our Bench had the old value (322.9MB/s) in it. I manually updated the graph with the newer and more reasonable 261.5MB/s result but for some reason the actual graph wasn't updated. It's fixed now!Reply